Dierk Schmidt

The artist Dierk Schmidt (Unna, 1965) makes use of the aesthetic and the visual to disrupt positivist and liner concepts of history with respect to the omissions and violence in colonial narratives — one of the core themes running through his work, along with a need for the restitution of plundered objects and the related international law — the manipulation of museum discourses and the contrived and dramatic state of televised politics.        

The retrospective held by the Museo Reina Sofía assembles some of Schmidt’s most ambitious projects as The Division of the Earth or Broken Windows and concludes with a site-specific project related to the role of the Palacio de Velázquez — where the show is displayed – directly after it was built in 1883 and in view of its housing, in 1887, part of the monographic exhibition of the Philippines, Mariana and Caroline Islands, before becoming the Biblioteca y Museo de Ultramar (the Museum-Library of the Overseas).